The most striking thing about this list for me is the lack of hard-core organic chemists in there. There are two bona fide synthetic chemists (Sharpless and Fokin) and no total synthesis people. Almost any such list from the 50s through the 90s would have been dominated by organic chemists engaged in methodology and total synthesis. Of course, as an enabling discipline synthesis is still key for all the research carried out by these heavy hitters. Organic synthesis will still be ubiquitously embedded in key chemical innovations. Organic chemists will still make important contributions and their syntheses will continue to be works of art imbued with elegance and economy. But organic chemistry as seen and practiced for forty exciting years by the old guard seems to be distinctly on the wane. I can almost sense a sigh and the wistful note of nostalgia.

Instead, what obviously dominates the list is nanotechnology and materials science. The materials range from pure inorganic materials to organic-inorganic hybrids to biomaterials. Materials science has clearly reigned during the past decade and will probably dominate the chemical landscape even more in the future. I suspect that other lists using different indices will come up with a similar smattering, perhaps with some more core biological chemists thrown in.

Perhaps the old guard of organic synthesis can seek respite in Tennyson's immortal lines:

4 comments:

" Of course, as an enabling discipline synthesis is still key for all the research carried out by these heavy hitters. Organic synthesis will still be ubiquitously embedded in key chemical innovations."

The questions should be answerd by checking the nobel prize winners in organic chemistry with emphasis in synthesis. There are more than 25 winers; any other discipline will never achieve someting like this.

That's certainly true if you are talking about the last 30-40 years. But how many of us foresee a Nobel Prize for pure methodology or total synthesis in the near future? The palladium and metathesis prizes were quite belated. In the last twenty years most chemistry Nobels have been awarded to biochemistry-related research. And going by the current trends, we can be sure to see more prizes for materials science (it looks kind of prophetic that conducting polymers kicked off the new millennium in 2000)

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“Ashutosh (Ash) Jogalekar is a scientist and science writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has been blogging at the “Curious Wavefunction” blog for more than ten years, and in this capacity has written for several organizations including Nature, Scientific American and the Lindau Meeting of Nobel Laureates. His professional areas of interest include medicinal and computational chemistry. His literary interests specifically lie in the history and philosophy of science.”
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